The following account is based on media accounts by the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Pueblo Chieftain, The Denver Post, the former Rocky Mountain News and other media sources including accounts by TV stations and wire service reports.

Monica LaSuer, 26, is one of several women killed in the years before a killer confessed to killing two Colorado Springs women

When he spoke with Burnett, Rogers left out a lot of details. For example, he didn’t give the names of the two women he claimed to have murdered. He didn’t say when or where he murdered them. He didn’t even tell his friend the circumstances.

Police initially didn’t know whether they could believe any part of this brazen man’s story. Nevertheless, they took his account very seriously.

Colorado Springs police investigated Rogers’ account of killing two Colorado Springs women. They began pulling up old cases to see if they could identify any patterns.

Pueblo detectives began investigating Rogers’ murder claim.

Right away, they recognized which murder Rogers had spoken about.

On July 20, 2005, truckers who were smoking outside the Mystic Caberet, 4301 N. Elizabeth St., told bouncers at the club about a man acting suspiciously outside the club. A bouncer called police.

When police drove to the club and searched a field behind the building, they found the body of a partially clothed woman near a tree.

The identification found on the woman indicated she could be 20-year-old former stripper Stephanie Salazar. But police couldn’t tell who the victim was based on the driver’s license photograph.

Salazar had gone to the club where she had previously worked for a going-away party with friends. Salazar was planning on moving out of state. The last time her friends had seen her that night was when she went outside to smoke a cigarette.

Whoever killed Salazar had beaten her severely. Defensive wounds indicated she had fought for her life. Her killer had apparently dragged her by her feet through a field to a makeshift dump.

Salazar’s face was covered with blood. Her eyes were swollen shut. Her nose appeared to be broken. Blood covered her shirt, midsection, hands and arms.

Salazar’s shirt and bra were wrapped around her neck, and her pants were pulled down.

Ultimately, the Pueblo County coroner determined that Salazar had been strangled. However, there was no semen found on her body to indicate that she had been raped.

I would like to see those murders closed as much as any other resident, but closing them doesn’t equal justice. Hope he confesses to these murders or more evidence is presented, this looks great on paper but doesn’t seem like enough pointing to him. Sorry.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.